/charter — The Project Constitution

You are setting the standing context for the whole SPARK loop. The constitution lives at .spark/constitution.md and is read by every agent before phase work — so decisions that hold across all features are made once here, not re-argued in every /story-time.

Input

Optional argument: a principle, constraint, or "set up our ground rules". No argument → offer to create the constitution from scratch or amend the existing one.

Steps

1. Delegate to the Facilitator. Invoke the facilitator agent with the path .spark/constitution.md, the template from ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/templates/constitution.md, and the user's input verbatim. Say whether this is a first draft or an amendment if you already know; the agent will otherwise detect it from the file's presence. The Facilitator has no shell — for §9 Project Context, always gather a read-only git summary yourself (git log --oneline -20, further back on a young project; if the repo has no commits at all, hand over that it is empty rather than nothing) and hand it over with the rest, the same pattern /next-steps step 1 uses for the loop-state brief. Do this on every first draft, not only ones with source files or a manifest — a greenfield repo can still have real commits worth grounding §9 in — and do it again on any amendment that touches §9 (adding it where absent, or correcting an existing entry): the Facilitator's own git history is no fresher on an amendment than on a first draft, so skipping it there would recreate the same false-absent risk one call site over. The Facilitator reads README.md, CLAUDE.md and .spark/ specs itself via its own Read tool.
2. Relay, don't guess. The agent grounds a draft in the codebase but cannot talk to the user. When it returns questions — the team's priorities, a deliberate quality bar, a contradiction only the user can resolve — put them to the user (AskUserQuestion where the choices are enumerable), then re-invoke the agent with the answers.
3. Present the result. Show the user the drafted constitution, separating what the agent inferred from the project from what still needs their decision, plus any contradiction it flagged. Keep it short — a constitution nobody reads is dead weight. Surface the detected type(s), characteristics and proposed active lenses (e.g. seo, ux, security) as their own decision, with the evidence the agent found — this is what makes later phases situational (an SEO lens only runs on a website, a security lens only when the project handles auth or PII), so confirm it consciously with the user rather than letting it ride. Also surface the active-lens load — if 4+ lenses come out active, flag the elevated load so the user sees each phase will carry several lenses (no cap, just visibility). Surface the QA method (§8) as its own explicit decision too, with the evidence the agent found — whether this project has a browser-observable surface, and if not, which method the QA phase performs instead. Never let it ride on the profile or the lens state: a project with no website and no web-app is evidence for the question, never the answer to it, so a mis-typed profile can never suppress QA on its own. Leaving it undeclared is a valid answer and the default — QA then behaves exactly as it does today. /charter is the only ceremony that may create or amend this declaration. Surface the Project Context (§9) as its own decision too, in this same round — never a separate one: show the product brief and, where the repo has code, the system picture, each entry marked inferred from <file:line> / asked / confirmed by user / not stated / not found so the user can confirm or correct in one pass alongside the profile and QA method. On a first draft, or on an amendment where §10 is absent or the update rule in ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/tools/README.md § The companion offer applies, read version from ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/.claude-plugin/plugin.json for the Facilitator, make that one offer in this same round (AskUserQuestion; never a separate round) and record the answer in §10. Never run an install.
4. Iterate. Fold the user's edits back in via the agent until they're satisfied. On an amendment, confirm the Amendments log records the change and its reason.
5. Confirm. Remind the user the constitution now binds every phase — the PO scopes within it, the EM plans within it, the Reviewer enforces it. If the kickoff interview named a first slice, offer /story-time <first slice> and invoke it only on the user's explicit go — never automatically.

Rules

• The constitution holds principles and constraints, never per-feature requirements — those belong in a spec. If the user brings a feature idea here, note it and point them to /story-time.
• The active lenses are the user's decision, like every other entry. Detection proposes them from the repo; it never switches one on silently. A lens the team won't act on comes back off — dead weight erodes trust in the rest of the constitution.
• Keep every entry falsifiable and true. Delete aspirational lines the project doesn't actually follow; a false constitution erodes trust in all the others.
• This is the user's document. You draft and challenge, but the user decides what the team is bound by.

Handoff

• Constitution set → /story-time (spec the first feature within it) or /spark (run the full loop).